On Sunday night I had an anxiety dream. I was on a rollercoaster, but rather than being safely strapped into a regular carriage I was on a wooden platform holding on in the hope I wouldn’t be thrown off.

Travelling at speed and out of my control, I also had something tugging at my leg from beneath the platform. I couldn’t see what it was, but it kept grabbing me. Careering towards oblivion, being attacked from below, I woke up with a start. The first thought that popped into my head was ‘maybe the Port Vale game will be on iFollow’.

When it came to kick-off, the TV had already been commandeered for the Wrexham v Notts County game, it’s fair to say that Wrexham has achieved more cut-through in our house than Simon Clist and Craig Nelthorpe ever did back in the day.

Instead, I watched us on my laptop as the mayhem at the Racecourse Ground unfolded. With Wrexham featuring Elliot Lee and (I thought, though he wasn’t even on the bench) Anthony Forde and Notts County with Sam Slocombe and Jodi Jones, switching between two games engendered another fever dream. There was so much going on, there were moments when I transposed players into the wrong game – Sam Slocombe playing in goal for Port Vale, Jodi Jones replacing Josh Murphy at The Racecourse, that kind of thing. When the Wrexham game peaked, my eyes darted around to work out why everyone was so excited by Marcus McGuane playing a short defensive pass to Stuart Finlay.

Following encouraging results against Sheffield Wednesday and Peterborough, many had earmarked Port Vale as ‘The One’ where the win-gods would finally cast their divine powers towards us, or something. 

Everything had fallen into place; they’ve been in a form of total and irreparable collapse in recent weeks and we’re emerging from the Robinsonian darkness. The narrative, it was written. It turned out that Port Vale, as an unremarkable team, are going through a period of acute un-remarkability. Put that against a team looking for its mojo and you get precisely what you’d expect – the immovable dog turd meets the irresistible cow dung.

In the starkest contrast, Wrexham and Notts County were playing with wild abandon, both having over 100 goals and points this season, they have mojos coming out of their ears. 

In the stands were Wrexham owners and Hollywood documentarians Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mcelhenney, who have fallen on their feet in ways they don’t understand. Content and narrative is flowing from every orifice, their investment in Wrexham was always likely to bring success, but last year ended in a biblical 5-4 play-off defeat to Grimsby and this year has been a Rocky-like slugfest with Notts County peaking with a winner takes-all all-in bank holiday brouhaha; you couldn’t write it.

Because, you can’t. Our desire for Port Vale to be The One does not make it so. The improvements against Peterborough and Sheffield Wednesday don’t ensure a linear improvement back to safety. There has been an improvement in recent weeks, and I’d say that as turgid as the Vale game was, it was in the same ballpark of recent games. 

Port Vale was a data point, not a trend, in the great predict-o-rama, you said that our three games against Peterborough, Wednesday and Port Vale would elicit a single point, in the end we’ve got three. Had we lost the first two – as was expected – and won against Vale we’d have been happier, even though the points haul would have been the same. Had it been pre-scripted, we’d have come away with a win to begin a glorious march to safety.

The predict-o-rama also tells us how bad everyone is at predictions; presumably this is why gambling companies are so rich. Despite there being a strong consensus as to the outcome of nearly every game, your prediction accuracy is currently running at a princely 42%. And so, The One – i.e. a win, could easily come at Barnsley or against Bolton as it could have at Vale Park. We’ve been caught at least twice this season – against Cambridge and Burton – where the narrative has exploded in our faces and even a couple of times when its pleasantly surprised us (Ipswich and Bolton). 

That said, despite the variations in individual predictions; the division is still on track to relegate the same four as you originally thought, it’s easier to predict trends than it is to spot individual data points.

For us, goals are clearly a problem, but to sacrifice our defensive gains to break a goalscoring hoodoo would, again, be chasing the narrative. Stuart Finlay, interviewed after the game, said of Simon Eastwood that he’d made some good saves, but ‘that’s what he’s there to do’. People say this about keepers in a way they wouldn’t about a striker who’d bagged a hat-trick – ‘great goals, but that’s what he’s there to do’. If Eastwood doesn’t make those saves, then they become goals and we lose the game. So, in a weird and topsy turvy world, our greatest path to victory is currently our goalkeeper; if he keeps them out then we don’t have to score a bucket load to win games. Let’s not abandon what we’ve got to chase what we don’t.

People have talked about a nine-game season, I think we’re more likely looking at a nine-game game – there will be setbacks, mistakes, near misses and frustrations, but we shouldn’t over-analyse or over-predict and instead focus on what the next challenge. We are all anxious to find out how this pans out and inventing a narrative gets us to a conclusion quickly, the chances of it being correct, however, are limited.